"I Walked Home Beholding"

P.W. Elverum & Sun

Artists:

"I Walked Home Beholding" is the becalmed spiritual clearing at the end of the midnight-black new Mount Eerie record, Ocean Roar. "The world had frozen, I left the studio/ Night had fallen, the storm had cleared/ The whole town had been abandoned except for me," Elverum sings. The music surrounding him is spacious and awestruck, a hymn-like organ progression dotted with a few guitar notes and echoing finger snaps. The image it suggests is evocative and universal: Who hasn't walked down their street after a torrential storm, wondering at the stillness? But it's also the blessed moment when a fever breaks, when a baleful psychic cloud lifts and you once again feel yourself able to lift your eyes to "all the people slowly living all their lives," as Elverum puts it. In his music, the body is land and land is the body: "This is the feeling from inside an island body," he breathes at the close, and it stirs a cosmic well of loneliness that recalls Modest Mouse's "3rd Planet".